Hungry fans eat up 'Hannibal'

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEW YORK - Millions of readers and moviegoers know far more about psychopath Hannibal
Lecter, who likes to dine on parts of his victims, than about the shy, polite and utterly
pleasant Southern gentleman who created him.

Author Thomas Harris would rather write than talk.

So when Harris' grisly novel Hannibal hit
bookstores Tuesday, there were no TV interviews, no author tours, no book signings - just
bookstores opening at midnight to accommodate the readers who'd waited 11 years for the
sequel to The Silence of the Lambs.

Delacorte, a division of Random House, says it's printing 1.3 million copies. Based on
advance orders, Barnes & Noble vice president Mary Ellen Keating predicts Hannibal
will be this year's best-selling novel. That means outselling The Testament by John
Grisham and Hearts in Atlantis, out in September from Stephen King, who raves about
Hannibal in The New York Times Book Review next Sunday, calling Lecter
"the great fictional monster of our time."

Thomas Harris:Lets his picture and books speak for themselves.

Amazon.com reports that Hannibal was the hottest book for a week before it
was published and reviewed. On-line orders began piling up as soon as it was announced in
March that Harris had turned in his manuscript. His contract (two books for $5 million)
calls for no editing, which helped speed Hannibal into print.

As for the mysterious author, he's a former reporter who is friends with writers and
reporters but hasn't done an interview in nearly 20 years, shielding himself from the
obvious question: "Don't you have to be a bit of a psychopath to write so
convincingly about psychopaths?"

Consciously or not, Harris' public silence has become part of the Harris mystique.

Even his age - 58 or 59, depending on whom you ask - isn't readily known.

In an era of celebrity confessions, when writers sell themselves like politicians,
Harris has no use for such publicity. He tells those who persist, "I thank you kindly
for your interest, but I wish to allow my work to speak for itself."

He may be an anti-celebrity, but he's no recluse. Harris likes small parties, football
and cooking for friends (he's taken cooking lessons at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris). He poses
for photographers. Just don't ask him to talk.

"What you see (of Harris) is definitely what he wants you to see," says
Stephen Byers, a writer and former editor of Men's Journal who has been to several
small dinner parties with him. "If you've read his books, he's unexpected. He's
polite, civilized, reticent. But he doesn't give much away."

Byers adds: "He knows if he started doing interviews, some aggressive journalist
would eventually find out something that he may not want everyone to know. And he's too
shy and too smart to let that happen."

Southern Gothic

Harris spends his summers in Sag Harbor, on the eastern end of Long Island, and winters
in Miami. If he's extravagant beyond that, it's apparent only in his personal fleet: He
owns a Jaguar and a Porsche.

What's known about his life lacks the rich details that saturate his chilling fiction.
He's divorced and has a daughter, Anne, who works for his publisher and shares his
distaste for publicity. For 20 years, he has lived with a woman, Pace Barnes, who used to
work in publishing and is as outgoing as he is quiet.

An only child, Harris grew up in Rich, Miss., population 100, in the Delta, just off
Highway 61. His father was an engineer who turned to farming. His mother taught high
school chemistry and biology.

Harris majored in English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, enthralled with the
works of Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner. He moonlighted as a police reporter at The
News-Tribune and wrote true-crime stories for magazines like True.

In Waco, Harris showed the first glimpse of an obsession with evil. He dived into a
story about a Mexican prostitute ring that enticed young girls from the barrios who later
turned up dead. Harris was most interested in a villainous old woman who dressed in black,
rode in a limousine and offered gifts to the girls and their families.

After graduation in 1964 and travels around Europe, Harris went to work as a local
reporter for The Associated Press in New York, mostly covering crime and politics,
"nothing glitzy at all," says a colleague from those days, Nick Pileggi, who
went on to write Wiseguys."But we all wanted to do something
more."

Trying out terror

In 1973, Harris and two other reporters, Sam Maull and Dick Reilly, on the
4:30-p.m-to-12:30-a.m. shift at AP, laughed at Naked Came the Stranger, a sexy
novel that 25 reporters at Newsday wrote in a kind of literary relay race.

"We said, 'Hell, we can do that,'" Maull says.

A year after Palestinian terrorists attacked the Munich Olympics, the three would-be
novelists came up with a plot about Palestinian terrorists and a crazed Vietnam vet
attacking a packed football stadium on Super Bowl Sunday. Harris thought of using a
Goodyear blimp to deliver the explosives aimed at 100,000 spectators, including the
president.

"The idea was to share the writing, but after 50 pages, Tom took over, which was
obviously a good thing," Maull says, "Dick and I did the research. Tom did the
rewrite."

Black Sunday, published under Harris' name, got mixed reviews (too predictable,
said several critics), but the book and the movie were hits. Maull says the royalties and
film rights were divided three ways, "without a cross word."

Then came the novel that made Harris' reputation. The Silence of the Lambs,
about the search for a serial killer who makes bodysuits from human flesh, was a hit even
before the 1991 movie with Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins.

Now Lecter is back, out of the basement of the Baltimore State Hospital for the
Criminally Insane. The movie rights sold for $10 million.

Far from Hollywood, Harris does his homework, doting on details, working at making the
bizarre believable. He's done time at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Va.,
studied a videotaped interview with serial killer Ted Bundy and attended the 1994 trial in
Italy of a farmer accused of murdering couples and cannibalizing their sex organs.

In Sag Harbor, Byers remembers Harris' intense interest in Byers' engraved Browning
B-25 shotgun. "He fondled it and broke it open and admired the grain in the French
walnut on the stack and talked about the fine checking on the wrist. He knows guns."

But every now and then, another side to Harris surfaces, beyond the Southern gentleman,
beyond the scholar.

Byers may have glimpsed it at a birthday party, when the testimonials dragged on. From
the back of the room came a growl - "a voice like the demon girl in The Exorcist."

Byers swung around. "It was Tom Harris flashing a grin. It was weird."

The graphic
violence in Thomas Harris' new novel, Hannibal, will not deter Hollywood from doing
a sequel to the Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs, says producer Dino De
Laurentiis, who owns the film rights to the book.

An old friend for dinner:Anthony Hopkins, who was Hannibal Lecter in
1991's 'Silence of the Lambs,' could be in the sequel.

"The media has had it all wrong," De Laurentiis says about speculation
that Silence director Jonathan Demme declined to work on Hannibal because it
is too violent. "He passed because he said, 'The original won five Academy Awards,
and I don't know if I can do better.'"

Now director Ridley Scott, whose credits include such darkly themed winners as Blade
Runner, Alien and Thelma & Louise, is in talks to do the film.

Demme doesn't sound regretful about passing on the movie. "I want to see
it. I hope Ridley does it. Maybe five years ago I would have done it," but he has
moved on to other interests.

De Laurentiis says he will sit down with Scott in the next two weeks to discuss
casting and hiring a writer to adapt the book.

De Laurentiis hopes to have a script by October or November and to begin
shooting in March or April.

As for reuniting the original film's stars, Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins,
nothing is set, but Hopkins reportedly is interested. There is no word about Foster

A movie of Hannibal will be costly, especially if Hopkins and Foster
decide to return. De Laurentiis already spent $10 million for the rights to the book.

Despite De Laurentiis' schedule for Hannibal, the movie still has a
number of hurdles before getting to the big screen.

De Laurentiis is in negotiations with Universal to distribute the film.

"We are actively pursuing the project, though it is not set up here
yet," Universal's Terry Curtin says.

Universal executives indicate that while the violence is a concern, lining up
essential cast and crew also is key.

Given the tremendous success of Silence, Hannibal could be
difficult to pass up.

Silence, released in 1991, grossed $130.7 million in the USA and Canada.
Along with winning the best-picture Oscar, the movie earned Demme the best-director award
and Hopkins and Foster best actor and actress.